Notes:

August 2002
We are here in Colorado! We have staked our claim!

Ray Carving

Looking good!

Almost done

In the ground!

September 2002We are adjusting to living as renters. Everything is quite temporary to
say the least. We have lists of what is in what boxes out in the garage.
We have unpacked and repacked most the important boxes and found the good
china; etc. to be in great shape (Thank you Beacon Moving!).

We are still waiting for our blueprints of the house. Without them we can't
do much because the county must approve them before we proceed. The dome
institute has been working on them since June so we should get them soon!
We have spent a couple of days in Aguilar, CO helping another group put
together their Airforms. (Airforms = the material that forms the shape
of the dome building) Seeing how it is done encourages us to make our own.

October 2002
October has arrived and we are still waiting for the Monolithic Dome Institute
to finish our engineering drawings. Once we get them we will have something
to do! We are so bored that we have taken on the task of pulling out all
the old files and purging just about everything. Ever look through 35 years
of old checks? Interesting what you find. You can actually burn up a new
shredder attempting to discard all those documents you no longer want.
Wow can you imagine the fun of watching the shredder go up in flames and
knowing that you really should do something so that the shredded stuff
doesn't catch fire also? Yes its almost to that point. At least we haven't
gotten tired of each other yet.
OK more positive! Some have asked us - why Colorado? Check the following
out:

Flower

Cactus

Antelope

Sunset

Sunset

Fishing at sunset

Still Fishing

Rabbit

Our hill at sunset. Is that real gold?

Sept Snow on Mountains

Sunset

Mountain in the clouds

November 2002Wow! We finally have our complete drawings!! After figuring out what the
county needs we visited a bunch of offices last Wednesday and handed in
everything requested. Now a week of waiting. Hopefully they will be happy
with everything we provided. I am sure they are examining everything in
great detail since (they indicated) that this it the first Monolithic Dome
in the Pueblo County. Bet they will be drawing straws to be the inspector
as things progress in the future.
Having ran out of things to shred we had to start a new hobby! Daily we
read the classified adds. Every day every add. Yep its almost that bad.
We have spent a great deal of time figuring out how to fix our (dry) creek crossing. To check out the latest on that goto theBlack hole topics to see the entire story.11/14/02 We have our building permit! Watch the Construction page for progress!11/21/02 Wow check this Coyote out (honestly I did not get close enough
to verify if he was a he or not).

December 2002:
Wow what a month! Besides the GREAT weather we are actually getting a few things done around our home site.
Check it out at our Construction page. Did I mention the winter weather? Its been in the 50's and 60's almost every day! Sure beats Chicago weather. We laugh as we stroll around with jackets on and see people in heavy coats. I don't think they could survive in Chicago. .January 2003Welcome to a new year! It should be an exciting year for us. We have already
spent a great deal of time working on finishing our bridge. The weather
has been very kind to us. Yesterday we working in our T-shirts! How is
the weather in Chicago land? (Sorry just had to rub it in a little)

We spotted a few dear playing in the snow on land adjacent to our property.We hope to begin making the Airforms and get prepared to start building
soon.February 2003
We have started our Airforms! Check it out.

Wow snow!! We haven't seen much of this stuff! Look closely and check out
the elk or dear tracks running right down the center of the picture. Sorry
we weren't there to take its picture. (Tracks on the right are humans.)

March 2003
Early in the month things got quite warm here. We where able to start our footings (click in the link below) and got the pads poured before getting socked with over 2 feet of snow. We had expected to see that back in December and January but from what we here this is pretty normal for this area. Not 2' but moisture in March. Needless to say our property or at least the house site is an entire mud ball. Now things have to dry our before we can resume working as well as moving our trailer to the property. Yep we plan on being close to our project. Not being able to get onto our property we are not able to take any pictures to post here. Most people at the property are just stuck at their houses for now. The roads have to be plowed so they can move. This storm is very unusual so being stuck is not the norm.

3/26/03 We hauled our first (of many) load of rocks! To sound excited about hauling rocks - we must be really hard pressed for excitement - what do you think? No we haven't lost our minds yet. We found a source for free rocks and can use them all around the place so we are taking advantage of it. \the run off does erode the ground quite a bit (obvious from our creek crossing experience) so it is imperative to provide some protection to help prevent this erosion. Here is our first load of rocks and the culvert exit we (hopefully) helped protect. the drop was a good four feet below the culvert that was being washed away by the water running out of the culvert. The rocks should provide much more stability to this area. Now only 999 more loads to go!

Check out the concrete we added to keep all these rocks in place! Go to our Footings page.

4/3/03
Today we moved our trailor onto the property! Now we can be close to the
action!

Now - how do we stuff everything into the tailor from a 2 story 4 bedroom
house??

Now we are set! Beth has her porch with a bench (of course!).
We added storage below it to store the work shoes and what ever else we can stuff into it rather than bring the dirty stuff into the trailer.